From the Narthex

Ed. Note: In this special section, which runs as an occasional feature, we present samples of the offerings in the Narthex, the NOR’s online blog. If you like what you read, visit newoxfordreview.org/narthex for more — much more! Our bloggers, in addition to John M. Grondelski, James G. Hanink, and James M. Thunder, include Jason M. Morgan, David Daintree, and Barbara E. Rose. The Narthex is updated on a regular basis, so there’s never a shortage of NOR material to read and reflect on.

To Whom Do Children Belong?

By James G. Hanink

The Blaine Amendment of 1875 sought to add the following language to the U.S. Constitution: “No money raised by taxation in any State for the support of public schools, or derived from any public fund therefor, nor any public lands devoted thereto, shall ever be under the control of any religious sect; nor shall any money so raised or lands so devoted be divided between religious sects or denominations.” The amendment failed to gain a two-thirds majority in the U.S. Senate. Nonetheless, Blaine’s proposal helped shape state laws that blocked state aid to Catholic schools.

But even settled law has a way of shifting, however slowly. It was only in 2020 that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue that the Constitution forbids states from excluding families and schools from “educational choice programs” solely on the grounds of their religious status. Two years later, the court ruled in Carson v. Makin that states may not prohibit families that participate in educational-choice programs from selecting schools that provide religious instruction.

What follows from these rulings? Most recently, Nebraska passed a bill that provides scholarships to eligible students to attend a non-public school of their choice. It does this by creating a “voucher” program. This voucher program provides $10 million in state funding that can be used by families in need of scholarships.

The Nebraska Catholic Conference (NCC) labored long and hard for such legislation and welcomes the fact that, by design, the program reflects a special concern for those who are most in need. Nonetheless, the NCC knows its work isn’t over. Not surprisingly, the state’s teachers’ union promises to challenge the bill.

What’s driving the debate over voucher programs and related tax credits? With my fellow panelists on The Open Door videocast this past May, I interviewed Tom Venzor, executive director of the NCC. Venzor, an attorney, argues that the core of the debate is about what he calls “first principles.” The principles come to the forefront when we ask the decidedly blunt question, “To whom do children belong?”

The Christian answers that children bear a fundamental dignity that comes with their being fashioned in the Creator’s image and likeness. As such, they ultimately belong to God. The secularist, of course, cannot give this answer and often can’t even make sense of it. So, for him, the default answer becomes that children somehow belong to “society” or, as Hillary Clinton put it, “the village.” But neither society nor the fanciful village is a legal agent. Enter the state, with its powers and privileges.

Let’s remember that at one point the State of Oregon had it in mind to require all children to attend public schools. But the Supreme Court, in Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925), denied Oregon’s educational “kidnapping.” Under Associate Justice James Clark McReynolds, the court ruled that “the child is not the mere creature of the State; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations.”

And who first nurtures the child and seeks his full and rich future? Not the school board or the teachers’ union. It is the family that does so; it is the family that has the primary duty to prepare the child for his obligations, both personal and social. Parents are the first educators of their children.

The child is no more a creature of the state than is, say, the artist or scientist. The state has legitimate purposes, of course. But so does civil society, and the family is the first unit of society. Or so argue the NCC and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

We know, of course, that the very nature of the family is, of late, fiercely debated — and not for the first time in history. Perhaps it could not be otherwise. As Pope Francis, following in the footsteps of the fisherman, so often reminds us, Satan, like a roaring lion, roams about seeking whom he can devour (cf. 1 Pet. 5:8). The secularist, to be sure, can’t make sense of this injunction either. It is, however, a lynchpin of Christian realism.

James G. Hanink is an independent scholar, albeit more independent than scholarly!

Sleek Barbarians

By John M. Grondelski

“Sleek barbarians” is a term and concept articulated by contemporary Polish philosopher Zbigniew Stawrowski, which I have tried to popularize and disseminate in the English-speaking world. I do so because the concept seems to have even broader application here in the United States than in Poland (though Poland does not lack for its own “sleek barbarians”). The term is found in Stawrowski’s 2013 book The Clash of Civilizations or Civil War.

To understand “sleek barbarians,” we must first understand the broader parameters of Stawrowski’s thinking. Pace the end-of-the-Cold-War “thinkers” who announced the “end of history,” convinced that their ideas of “liberal democracy” had won and that maybe the fundamental modern cleavage was between “the West and the rest” — those who made an act of faith in their version of “liberal democracy” versus those who didn’t (think Middle Eastern jihad types) — Stawrowski argues that the fundamental fissure is to be found in the West itself. The fundamental fault line is between the tradition of the West, of Rome, Athens, and Jerusalem, versus an Enlightenment/post-Enlightenment caricature of “the West” and its tradition that rejects its Judeo-Christian roots.

The latter, however, is not unlike the cuckoo, a lazy bird that lays its eggs in other birds’ nests, getting them to do the incubation for them. The caricaturists have appropriated the terminology — words like rights, freedom, and dignity — but invested them with meanings not just different from, but opposite of, what they ever meant in Western culture. That is how we get the “right” to kill your offspring, the “freedom” to commit suicide or redefine reality (like marriage) to your liking, and an endless chain of “microaggressions” against “dignity” on the part of those who reject the consequences of what the cognoscenti now denominate as “rights” and “freedom.”

The redefinitions of the West’s traditions now propagated as “rights” and “freedom” constitute, in the West’s tradition, barbarism. It is barbaric to say a woman has the “freedom” to end the life of her prenatal child up to birth. It is barbaric to say an adult male in minimal clothing has a “right” to twerk pornographically on a public street in full view of children. It is even barbaric to pretend that such barbarism is simply a matter for discussion and compromise over tea and crumpets.

How do “sleek barbarians” fit into all this? They’re the folks who advance these agendas. They push the agendas, implement them, advocate for them, and fight opponents of those agendas. Why “sleek”? Well, once upon a time, people who killed weak kids or groomed them were considered barbarians, and they looked the part. Today, their haute couture has led them out of dishevelment and into Saint Laurent, Burberry, Coach, and Gucci. These folks don powersuits to get injunctions in courts against laws banning genital mutilation of minors by white-coat-clad “experts.” These folks in powersuits also indict doctors who spill the beans about others’ doing genital mutilations of minors.

(An aside as an apology: We might imagine the Germanic tribes of fifth-century Europe as barbaric, but it was the toga-clad dads of Rome who were abandoning their kids under the patria potestas, while no few numbers of ancient Greek elites would have felt quite comfortable at drag-queen story hours.)

What reminded me of the “sleek barbarians” was a recent story in The New York Times: “The Resistance to a New Trump Administration Has Already Started” (June 16). The story itself reports very little news: All the folks who have pushed woke policies these past four years are busy devising Lawfare Plan B on the contingency that the Biden administration is thrown out of office on November 5.

What grabbed my attention, however, were the pictures. They caught my eye because they embody visually what Stawrowski was getting at: three people, two lawyers and a fundraiser for leftist causes, all in “power” clothes.

The advocate of illegal aliens is standing in the archway of a neo-Gothic college building, surrounded by all the stuff we like about campuses: arches, real stone, seals carved on walls, cathedral-like lights. The backdrop for the Left’s moneyman is the front façade of a classical-style building with six Doric columns, a college or government building. The other lawyer is standing in a lush grove in Hyde Park — a perfect representation of the cooptation of tradition of which Stawrowski speaks.

Ask yourself why The Times didn’t put the illegal-immigration lawyer against a backdrop of vulgar graffiti spraypainted on a city wall. Ask why the other lawyer is in Hyde Park at noon (and where the nearest London “bobby” is) rather than in Devoe Park in the Bronx at, say, 9 PM — and whether she should be dressed that way for her evening walk. Given the Hyde Park allusion to robust free speech, ask whether she believes in equally robust freedom of speech on social media, whether she wanted a Facebook Hyde Park Speakers’ Corner or a federal “dis/misinformation board” twisting platforms’ arms to take down what the “guardians of democracy” didn’t like. Ask the money rainmaker why, given the “exploitative nature of capitalism” being what it is, his backdrop reminds you of the New York Stock Exchange. Why isn’t he instead standing in front of some start-up cannabis shop near an inner-city school, next to his micro-fund grant recipient? Ask whether he’s got the lawyer on the phone to ban the Trump administration’s initiative that required government buildings be built in classical rather than “innovative” or brutalist style.

We saw this during the “campus occupations” earlier this spring. Cowed college presidents put pictures of their campus cloisters on their new student brochures and alumni newsletters, not the trash collections of Quad Tent City. And if you doubt sleek barbarism is a thing, ask the students who sing “From the River to the Sea” while defending terrorist rape, kidnapping, and murder on October 7 which river and what sea define the borders of the Palestine they demand be “free.”

Just as Stawrowski observes about the barbarians’ “cultural appropriation” of Western words in the service of anti-Western anti-values, so those pictures are worth a thousand words. None of these folks who are ready to “resist” wants to take a picture in front of the cultural trash their “resistance” generates. (It’s the same with the Church: Nobody, except some “liturgical planner” you don’t know or want to, takes pictures in front of the refurbished “Our Lady of Pizza Hut Catholic Community.” They take those pictures — especially for the bishop’s annual appeal — in front of the only grand church that looks like a church that’s still standing in the diocese after the infestation of planner locusts “renewed” the diocese into ruins.)

No, the sleek barbarians take the pictures, use the language, and steal the heritage of the West, all the while laying their cuckoo eggs in it.

John M. Grondelski (Ph.D., Fordham) is a former Associate Dean of the School of Theology at Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey. All views expressed herein are exclusively his.

Actionable Intelligence

By James M. Thunder

In the middle of the Gulf War of 1991, the commanding general, the late Norman Schwarz­kopf Jr. (“Stormin’ Norman”), complained that he was receiving intelligence reports filled with so many caveats, qualifiers, and footnotes that it was as though the reports had been written by lawyers. He demanded actionable intelligence.

As a lawyer, I thought it was bad enough that he criticized his analysts for submitting reports that did not meet his needs without comparing his weak, wavering, waffling subordinates to lawyers! It reminded me that when Jesus criticized the Pharisees for their scrupulosity in observing the law and for their hypocrisy, the lawyers declared to Jesus, “When you say these things, you insult us, too!” (Jesus, by the way, must have agreed with their assessment since He went on to badger them — cf. Lk. 11:37-52.)

What does every general want? Actionable intelligence. What does every president, defense secretary, foreign affairs secretary, and government department head want? Actionable intelligence.

What does every CEO want? What does every executive, every boss want? What does every client want? Actionable intelligence.

Indeed, I submit that actionable intelligence is the demand, the cry of every man, woman, and child. It is information upon which a person can rely in planning for the next hour, the next day, the next month, the next year. It is information upon which we can rely in planning our entire life. It was the cry, for instance, of St. Augustine, bishop of Hippo (A.D. 354-430), who recounted in his autobiographical Confessions his unrelenting pursuit of truth, that is, his pursuit of intelligence upon which he could rely, act, and live.

Jesus Himself reminded those who were considering becoming His disciples of their need for actionable intelligence. He asked them to suppose that they are about to build a house. They must ascertain the cost lest they have to stop after completing only the foundation and be the subject of ridicule. He asked them to compare themselves to a king who meets an opposing force. The king must ascertain the size of the opposing force and compare it to the size of his own army (cf. Lk. 14:28-32).

As it happens, there is actionable intelligence for every man, woman, and child. This actionable intelligence is from God Himself. It is what is called “revealed religion” or revelation. It is the Good News that on the first Christmas Day, God communicated His Word (cf. Jn. 1:14). He sent His only Son into the world to save every man, woman, and child (cf. Jn. 3:16). All those who believe in Jesus, in the Word of God made flesh, in Love personified, become children of God (cf. Jn. 1:12). Truly, any other kind of intelligence pales in comparison.

And what is the cost to you of acting on this intelligence? You will carry a cross, that is, lose your life (cf. Lk. 14:27). But consider the reward, such as that given by Jesus to the man executed alongside Him: “Today you will be with me in paradise” (Lk. 23:43).

Jesus, whom Handel described in his oratorio Messiah as King of Kings and Lord of Lords, is like no other king, lord, prince, dictator, president, chieftain, warlord, or gang leader who seeks your discipleship, your allegiance. King Herod the Great killed three of his sons because he thought they threatened his kingship. Yes, human kings kill their sons, daughters, wives, and commanders; suppress rebellions; and expand their territories through force of arms and the formation of coalitions. Jesus kills no one, harms no one, butchers no one, smashes no one, belittles no one. Rather, He gives life to every single soul, gives it freely, gives it abundantly, and gives it eternally. This is actionable intelligence par excellence.

James M. Thunder has left the practice of law but continues to write. He has published widely, including a Narthex series on lay holiness. He and his wife, Ann, are currently writing on the relationship between Fr. Karol Wojtyla (the future Pope) and laypeople.

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